Inleiding

While phone makers and operating system developers of dubious numeracy skip straight from eight to ten, Samsung stays strong and gives us the Samsung Galaxy S9+ (sans notch, even). Only teardown will tell if this phone is a true contender, or just a weird AR Emoji machine.

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The relocated fingerprint sensor becomes our first victim as we pry it from its home. A ring of stickiness keeps the sensor in, and your liquids out.

We're a little disappointed Samsung hasn't yet thought up a better way to route that fingerprint sensor cable—it got ensnared in some nasty glue as we pried off the back cover, nearly costing us the sensor. Next year Samsung?

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We'll have the motherboard free as soon as we twirl away two screws and spudger off a couple FPC connectors.

No one could have expected this display cable to be threaded through a slit in the chassis and latched onto the motherboard as if trying to pull it down to its doom...

...No one except for you, if you've read pretty much any of our Galaxy teardowns in recent years.

Samsung, we see why you did it, but we're pretty sure you're smarter than this. It's 2018—show us a display we can disconnect and replace without having to carve off a glued-down back cover. We dare you!

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Despite the dual image sensors, this double camera is a single unit, on a single PCB, with a single connector!

The S9+ camera grand total now comes to four—in addition to the (newly) dual main camera, we have the selfie and iris cameras.

An argument can be made that with the addition of the dual-aperture camera, the total is five cameras. Four image sensors yes, but five ways to capture those images.

The camera line appears to be called Star this time, compared to last year's "Dream" cameras.

Our friends over at TechInsights pulled the camera modules apart, and there are chips lurking in there. Samsung claims that their integrated DRAM helps the camera wrangle up to four times more image data. 960 FPS slo-mo, anybody?

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On the left, looking pretty much exactly like what we found last year, we have the S9+ hardware: iris scanner, front-facing camera, IR emitter, and proximity sensor.

On the right, the raison d'être for Apple's infamous notch: Face ID hardware including a front-facing camera, IR dot projector, IR camera, plus room for the flood illuminator and rangefinder embedded in the display.

Some assembly required.

Based on early reviews, it may have been overly ambitious of Samsung to jump on the Animoji train without a hardware update to bring it up to speed.

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Just like the S8 being called the “Dream”, the Note 8 was called the “Great” and the S9 is called the “Star.“ So yes, there are fingerprint sensors out there called the “Dream Finger,“ “Great Finger,“ and “Star Finger.“ Weird, yet hilarious.

Lmao, I hope you understand your referring to the ribbon and not the entire sensor; I am not at liberty to correct you, but lookup the description of a fingerprint sensor from a genuine OEM authorized reseller

Yes, I do understand that I am referring to the ribbon, that’s why I called it a cable. It’s not a leap to assume that the cable is carrying the label for the assembly. Just like the “S9+” printed on the rear case represents the whole phone, not just the glass.